Imaging Kyivan Rus’ then and now, or how to look at Antin Losenko’s Vladmir and Rogneda

Abstract

Antin Losenko’s Vladmir and Rogneda (1770), presenting a scene from the history of Kyivan Rus’, has been discussed widely in the context of the origins of    Russian history painting and of the invention of the Pan-Russian national iconography in which the imagery of pre-Muscovite Russia served as the myth of origin. The painting was immediately successful because it complied with the requirements of the Imperial Academy of Art to glorify Vladimir while putting blame on “haughty” and treacherous Rogneda. The vexed issue of Rogneda’s rape by Vladimir, as well as that of the Ukrainian ethnicity of its maker, has hardly been considered so far. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s thesis on history as a  constellation of past and present, I aim to identify counter-discourses that emerge in the process of a close visual analysis of this image by the contemporary viewer at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the name of “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, but also at the time of the “me-too” movement against sexual violence.